


This Is Why The Men In Black Don't Outsource

by PandaFlower



Series: You've heard of Independence Day... [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Absolutely fake science, Aliens, Being Hiruzen is Suffering, Complete crack, Just the one alien actually, M/M, Madara isn't paid to care about aliens, Pseudoscience, Tobirama is not paid to care about bugs, all his friends help, being kagami is Suffering, but it is, his friends are no help, it wasn't meant to be this way, so he doesn't, why aren't the sprinklers working, yet he is anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 02:58:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14823921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PandaFlower/pseuds/PandaFlower
Summary: Hiruzen regrets ever needing science credits for his law degree. Madara regrets getting out of bed this morning. Somehow, there are wasps.It's just another day for Tobirama.





	This Is Why The Men In Black Don't Outsource

Madara barely waited for the firetruck to slow down to a safe speed before he was throwing himself off, stalking up the campus lawn with single minded purpose, heedless of the startled students scattering in his wake. Smoke billowed in thin plumes from the second floor windows of the main lab building, and it was there Madara made an unerring, highly irritated beeline like a wasp with a purpose, guided by the fire alarms.

And also his cousin of indistinct relation squawking in his ear.

“Kagami, stop hovering. You’re picking up bad habits from Izuna,” Madara barked into the phone, shoving it between his ear and shoulder as he juggled an axe in one hand and shoved at the door with the now free other, growling when it wouldn’t budge. A bored-faced student who apparently didn’t get the memo that alarms mean vacate the building wandered by and pulled the door open for him, staring meaningfully at the push-pull directions. Madara thanked him by bodily hauling him up by the collar and depositing him outside.

“But Uncle!” Kagami whined. At least, Madara assumed it was more whining. “I told you they were disasters left unsupervised! You said—you were the one who said, ‘oh, it can’t be that bad’, well guess what? It is that bad—” Madara pulled the phone away from his ear with a grimace; it wasn’t feasible to jog upstairs while comfortably holding a phone to your ear anyway. “—This is why I hate running errands. This is Hiruzen’s job; the one thing he’s guaranteed not to screw up on his own. But nooo, he pulled an allnighter and he’s _tired_. Like I haven’t pulled a consecutive three trying to keep Professor Senju’s ass alive. Now something’s on fire!”

“Kagami!” Madara finally snapped after twenty minutes of listening to nervous babble; a new record for him. Seriously, Kagami called him five times in the last hour alone to ramble about all the things possibly going wrong and ‘inconsiderate classmates who turn their phones off in the lab’. “You’re on the other side of town, how do you even know there’s a fire?”

“I know a guy taking IT classes who hooked me up with an app that lets me know when the fire alarms near Professor Senju’s labs _and_ office go off,” Kagami said. Madara paused on the last step, blinking. “I know what you’re thinking; the office bit is surely overkill, and you would be surely wrong.”

Okay, clearly this went beyond the concept of hovering.

“I’m hanging up now before your _mild stalking_ tendencies turn out to be contagious,” Madara informed him tartly, cutting off his frantic “Wait, I’ll be there soon—!” with a vindictive jab and turning down the volume with something like relief, jamming the phone in a deep inner pocket and setting off down the halls.

Finding the source of the fire was easy enough, once he caught the panicked screaming coming from behind the rattling door. Madara bolted down the hall with due haste, catching sight of a head of dark hair pressed to the crosshatched window. The knob was thankfully cool to the touch and unlocked, which struck him as incredibly odd.

Nevertheless, he didn’t hesitate to yank the door open.

It opened to madness.

* * *

~ 20 minutes previous ~

“Kagami, run that through the centrifuge,” Tobirama blindly held out a tube in a vague direction, most of his attention riveted to the microscope in front of him. Hiruzen had no idea what he was looking at, he’d lost track of what they were doing three weeks ago and now it was far too late to ask.

“He’s out on errands, Professor.” Homura said, looking up from glaring blearily at his laptop where he was painstakingly constructing graphs. “He left like thirty minutes ago.”

“Fine. Homura you do it.”

Homura groaned and dragged himself out his chair, blearily accepting the tube and wobbling over to the centrifuge in the far corner. Koharu made a sympathetic face from where she was bent over a series a petri dishes full of bacteria ridden agar on the far side of the table. Hiruzen kept his face squished to said table, maybe if he played dead hard enough Professor Senju would ignore him. Predators focused on movement right? At least, he thought so. He was studying law, not animal behavioral sciences!

“Torifu, next slide please,” Tobirama held out a hand expectantly, gesturing impatiently when Torifu blinked at him, practically asleep on his feet and clinging to his energy drink. Why he was overseeing the solvents bubbling merrily in their strange maze of tubes and flasks over bunsen burners was a mystery to Hiruzen, he was pretty sure Torifu was sleep walking at this point.

Torifu removed a slide from a stack, and pulled a prepared petri dish out of the mini freezer. He swabbed a bit of bacteria from the dish onto the slide, sealed it with somehow steady hands and passed it over.

Oh, Hiruzen thought, that’s why. Torifu was doing something else entirely.

“Hey, Saru, is ‘less experienced in their field’ a good legal synonym for ‘pathetically small minded and unimaginative’ or would ‘those regrettably unwilling to explore boundaries’ work better?”

Shit, trust Danzo to ruin things for him without even trying.

“Saru, I know you’re awake. Stop ignoring me. Answer my question.” Danzo snapped his fingers impatiently, most of his attention riveted to the grant applications he was oh-so-helpfully filling out on Professor Senju’s behalf. Any other time, Hiruzen would be impressed. He was a law student, son of a lawyer, and he could still stand to learn a thing or two from Danzo’s sheer mastery of sneaking bureaucratic bullshit past expert eyes.

Then he remembered Danzo was only doing this because Professor Senju was still banned from applying for grants himself until _certain people_ , who may or may not be several Chairs and the Dean, started showing more progress in their therapy. Were he of weaker constitution it would give Hiruzen hives just thinking about it.

Hiruzen determinedly played dead with all the finesse law classes can teach, or failing that the violent responses from the light-eating mold in the back fridge. Seriously, he was only here to fill out his science credits. He knew nothing, he wasn’t even present. This body was merely an astral projection in a nightmare universe where sleep dropped your GPA like a rock.

“Saru, stop pretending to sleep,” Tobirama snapped without looking. “You’re supposed to be helping Danzo with the applications while he waits for the bacteria to finish in the steam bath.”

Hiruzen groaned, unsticking his face from the table. “But Professor!”

“No buts!” Tobirama shook a finger presumably meant in his direction. “Finals are coming up for all of you and you’ve still half a week’s worth of work to finish.”

“It’d be super helpful if he’d get a move on with the lab report already, _like he promised_ ,” Danzo said, looking very pointedly in his direction while he very pointedly avoided looking back. So what if he hadn’t made it past the introduction yet? The experiment was still ongoing! He had plenty of time to finish!

“That’s what you get for indulging his pity party and letting him partner with you,” Koharu called from her end of the table. “The rest of us were sensible and laughed in his face.”

“And I hate you all for it,” Hiruzen informed her solemnly. “I am never bailing you out of any legal mishaps.” Which by all rights should be a hefty threat if only he hadn’t partnered with the one who would need a lawyer most; Danzo may be minoring in ethics but as far as Hiruzen was aware it was just to look for loopholes.

Koharu smiled back sweetly and jabbed her stick into the petri dish like she was envisioning stabbing something else. Hiruzen tried not to cringe.

“For the last time don’t stab the agar!” Tobirama turned just enough to glare at her over his shoulder, gesturing impatiently to Torifu for another slide.

“Sorry, Professor!” Koharu chirped, mostly unrepentant.

“Homura, I have another tube for you. Is that other one finished yet?”

Silence.

“Homura?”

Like a tiny pack of sleep deprived and scientifically inclined meerkats every head in the room went up and swiveled in the centrifuge’s direction. Homura’s back was to them but one arm was crooked in a way Hiruzen knew meant he was biting his thumb in deep thought.

“Homura, any day now,” Tobirama said, sharp and impatient.

Homura finally turned around and sure enough he was biting on his thumb’s knuckle, brow furrowed in deep concern. “Professor, I think the centrifuge is broken.”

Tobirama sighed. “Just tap the side until it cooperates again, the department board still isn’t coughing up the funding to replace it.”

Homura glanced back— nervously? Oh no. “Nooo, not that, it’s just. The solvent. Is it...supposed to be corrosive when separated?”

Hiruzen whimpered. He was too young and beautiful to have his face melt off!

“...What?” Torifu said faintly, color draining from his face as the Professor’s lit up with keen interest.

“Not at all,” Tobirama breathed, eyes bright.

“Uh, yeah,” Homura coughed awkwardly. “It’s uh, it started melting through the tube so I slowed it down and now it’s eating through the innards.” Behind him, the centrifuge’s clear glass top melted inward and smoke and fire plumed out. Immediately the smoke detectors started shrieking in alarm.

Homura glanced back again. “Yeah, we’re gonna need to go after the department board like a debt collector with a bat and a grudge against knees to get that replaced.”

Danzo snorted.

“Don’t just stand there!” Koharu cried, hastily tossing her stick in the biohazard bin and slapping lids on petri dishes, hustling them in neat stacks to the chiller. “Grab the fire extinguisher!”

“Don’t grab the fire extinguisher!” Tobirama protested, all but skidding across the room in his haste to examine the centrifuge. “We need to make a note of this unprecedented reaction!”

“It’s on fire!” Koharu screeched. “Danzo back me up!”

Danzo scooped up his paperwork, taking the time to neaten it with a distinct lack of concern. “Don’t stick your face in the smoke, Professor. It’s a health and safety violation.” Koharu gestured furiously at him for his uselessness and he shrugged back.

Tobirama muttered an absent thanks in response, digging a full face mask out of the drawer under the flaming centrifuge. Then he paused and pulled the drawer out further to reveal the hole that had been burned through it. “Mm, that’s not ideal. It’s uncontained.” He cast around for a metal tray to slide under the centrifuge.

“ _It was never contained in the first place_ ,” Torifu said, only slightly hysterically, turning off the bunsen burners with one hand and trying to dig through the cupboards with the other. “Where’s the fire extinguisher?”

“Oh, I know! Kagami showed me!” Hiruzen dived for the long table, triumphantly yanking open a cupboard to reveal… an enormous jar of angry yellow jackets, furiously crawling all over the inside. “Um, what the hell is this, where did it go? Why, why is there—-?”

Homura peeked over his shoulder. “Huh, that’s where it went.”

Hiruzen slowly, jerkily, swiveled to look at him. “What.”

Homura blinked placidly, brows slowly rising as if he simply couldn’t comprehend what Hiruzen was flailing about this time. “When you go on a victory bender with entomologists to relieve some ‘I survived the mold’ stress shit can get a little wild. But! I got a souvenir out of it!” Then he scrunched his nose unhappily. “I’ve no idea how it got there.”

“B-but where did the extinguisher go?!” Hiruzen flailed, panicking.

“Kagami used it last night when Professor Senju took his frustrations out on that mold in the back fridge with an improvised flamethrower,” Homura said, as if that was perfectly sane and everything. “Remember? That’s why he’s out, to get another.”

Hiruzen whimpered. No, he did not remember. He was back at the dorm, sleeping like a real person instead of waging war on the alien lifeform that lived in the back fridge.

“Are you saying we don’t have an extinguisher?” Koharu demanded, bypassing panic straight to rage. “ _Are you fucking serious_?”

“How did that even get there if the lab was locked last night?” Danzo asked, because Danzo always asked the important questions. “How did you not know it was there in the first place?”

Homura tossed his head and gave Danzo a superior look down his nose, probably due to his glasses slipping. “Don’t question what I do when I’m drunk, Danzo. Drunk me knows what he’s doing.”

“ _Shut up and help me find the baking soda._ ” Torifu said not at all calmly.

“Yes, do,” Tobirama said with actual calm, gazing thoughtfully at the bonfire that was now twice its previous size. “This is getting a little concerning.” He tilted his head slowly. “Still very fascinating. This wasn’t supposed to be corrosive in the least. Nor are centrifuges normally this flammable.”

“Oh god, they’re gonna put us back on the hand-crank centrifuge, aren’t they?” Homura moaned in despair, clutching at his arm like he could already feel the phantom pain. Or was possibly remembering it.

“That is so not the issue here!” Koharu hissed. Torifu made a noise of frustration and outrage as the baking soda remained elusive.

And into this time of desperation Danzo uttered the most damning words Hiruzen will ever hear outside a court of law for the rest of his life.

“I wonder if we could kill the mold with this?”

The terrible thing is; they all considered it.

The fact that the mold was a pain in the ass that seriously outweighed that it was an honest to goodness alien probably factored into it. Hiruzen wasn’t...entirely certain as to the whole story but he heard tell from Homura who heard it from Kagami who was told by Professor Senju one night when he was spectacularly drunk that the mold was cultured from a strain of bacteria named Zetsu. It had been harvested from a chondrite meteorite, called Kaguya, by the astronomer who saw its original asteroid bounce off the moon and tracked its trajectory to earth.

Said astronomer also died a hideous death that officials declared had nothing whatsoever to do with the extraterrestrial bacteria he was studying. Absolutely not. Crazy talk.

Hiruzen didn’t need to be in law to call bullshit.

“I would just like to state, for the record, this is a terrible idea.” Torifu announced with resigned horror, slumping against the counter. He blinked as something caught his eye and he moved a box aside to reveal a bucket of baking soda. It was hastily snatched and the lid jerked off and Torifu slumped further in misery when it turned out to be empty. “Of course,” he despaired. “Of course.”

“The record stands,” Koharu replied, temper cooling in favor of something more pragmatic, already digging out the heavy duty gloves and tossing a pair to Danzo. “I, for one, would gladly see the last of that disgusting mold. I’m pretty sure it’s plotting our deaths.”

“Shouldn’t we be wearing full body suits for this?” Torifu pleaded for reason. “Kagami would want us to wear full body suits. Professor, back me up, this violates health and safety!”

“Kagami still has nightmares about the mold trying to gouge his eyes out,” Tobirama said dryly, adjusting his mask to sit more comfortably. “Pretty sure he’ll forgive us this once.”

“No, he won’t,” Homura interjected.

Tobirama scowled and pointed a warning finger at him. “You hush. And stop leaving your drunk projects in the bio labs, this is no place for bugs.”

“Yellow jackets!” Homura corrected with an affronted gasp. Picking up the jar and holding it close as if the wasps in question were collectively offended and in need of comfort. “How could you mislabel them so callously?”

Tobirama leveled a dull look at him. “I don’t get paid to care.”

 _No, of course not,_ Hiruzen thought sarcastically, _you get paid to research ways to kill alien lifeforms._ Hiruzen was almost ninety-nine percent certain that Professor Senju’s grant money came directly from a slush fund of some kind. _Ninety-nine percent._

“Coming through!” Koharu called. She and Danzo wrestled a small fridge on to the center table. It was a dull gray thing, wrapped in chains, bolted shut with three different locks, and ominously dented outwards from the inside. Frankly, it gave Hiruzen the heebie-jeebies just looking at it.

Tobirama pulled a battered set of keys out his pocket and advanced on the fridge, expression grim as he made short work of the locks. “Torifu, my longest tongs please.”

“We’re all going to die,” he whimpered, but gamely tossed them over. “Horribly. Snowed in by legal for all the safety regulations this tramples on.”

“Your lack of confidence is noted and not appreciated,” Tobirama said sternly. “Keep it up and you’ll be washing the beakers for extra credit.” Torifu whimpered for entirely different reasons now. “Stand back everyone!”

As one they all retreated to huddle by the door, Homura still clutching his jar of angry wasps. Tobirama readied his tongs and carefully eased open the fridge, from their angle Hiruzen caught the scorch marks on the inner side of the door, evidence of last night’s regular culling by fire of the meteorite’s strange slime mold tendrils that develop when left unchecked.

Hiruzen held his breath as Tobirama lifted out the fist-sized rock and quickly, before the black slime coating it could drip, dropped it into the flaming centrifuge.

Immediately, the rock began to wail.

A shrill piercing noise that stabbed at eardrums and reverberated in your skull until you lost all sense of direction beyond the burning need to _get away, oh god._

That or take a hammer to it.

Hiruzen hadn’t heard the likes of it since his late, lamented alarm clock rang in the middle of his last hangover.

“I think that’s a good sign!” Tobirama shouted over the noise. A seeping, seething darkness rose out of the centrifuge like bubbling evil, eating the fire, a blank white eye emerging from the mass. “Or maybe not!”

The —mold?— took a swipe at him and Tobirama merely leaned coolly out of reach and whacked it with the tongs. The screaming instantly stopped as the mass of what was definitely an alien lifeform paused in what Hiruzen would call bewildered shock on literally anything else.

“Food.” It rasped.

Hiruzen felt the color literally drain out of his face. _It could fucking talk!_ Torifu actually swayed on the spot and had to be propped up by Danzo and Koharu.

“Absolutely not,” Tobirama said sternly, undeterred as he was by common sense notions like the nature of sentience, the right to live even when you were an alien abomination, and when, precisely, the alien abomination in question had learned to talk. Good old Professor Senju, reliably certifiable.

The alien gave him a stink eye. “Eat you.”

“That’s nice,” Tobirama said with supreme nonchalance, pulling a capped tube of boric acid from his lab coat breast pocket. Why he carried boric acid around not even Kagami knew. He tucked the tongs under his arm, uncapped the tube, and flung it in the thing’s face. “But I object.”

The alien mold clawed at its face, grew by two sizes, and started shrieking again.

“Right,” Tobirama nodded, idly ducking more vicious swiping. “Right, we’re setting it on fire again. Koharu, what’s your preferred molotov cocktail recipe again?”

“Allegedly, I don’t have one of those.” Koharu pressed herself back against the door, hand inching to the knob. “I was cleared of all charges.”

“Well, _allegedly_ , if I set an alien infestation on the populace at large I won’t get tenure.” Tobirama brandished the tongs threatenly at the mold and it hissed at him. “So fork over your recipe!”

“We don’t keep those ingredients in here!” Koharu drew herself up in affront. “Remember? It was contingent to my not being put on probation for things I _allegedly_ did!”

“I keep a bottle of vodka and an emergency lighter at my workstation,” Homura remarked.

“ _Why?!_ ” Hiruzen all but wailed. He could feel his brain slowly dying trying to automatically catalogue how much deep shit Homura would be in if this were literally any other circumstance.

“For medical emergencies,” Torifu explained wearily, covering his face with his hands and doing his utmost best to just, pretend, for one goddamn minute, that he didn’t know these people and could not ever, conceivably, have to pick them out of a line up. But he did, and he could, and sadly had once or twice.

“We do still have the stuff that set the centrifuge on fire in the first place,” Danzo pointed out.

“We already tried that, it just made it grow.” Koharu snapped, flinging a hand out as if to encapsulate her teacher having a one-sided fencing match with said engorged mold to prove her point.

“Ye-es, but if we add new variables like high proof alcohol and normal fire it might do something different,” Danzo attempted a winsome smile. It just looked like something a snake oil salesman would wear.

“Honestly, it’s worth a shot,” Torifu said, still muffled by his hands.

“Might I remind you all the counter is still on _fire_? And spreading? Can we maybe not add more?” Hiruzen said testily.

“ _Any day now, children!_ ”

“Sorry, Professor!” They chorused.

“But yeah, I’m siding with Hiruzen on this one,” Homura commented, hefting his jar of angry yellow jackets under one arm. “The centrifuge fire we can legitimately write off as an accident. If they find vodka we won’t be able to bullshit it as, I don’t know, contaminated rubbing alcohol and then we’ll all be in shit.” After a thought he added, “And if the professor gets denied tenure because of it they will never find our bodies.”

“Fine, then we’re going for the knives.” Koharu nodded decisively and broke for the long central table. Unfortunately, the side with the knives was closer to the seething mass and ongoing duel than she would have liked.

“What? No! Koharu! They’re tiny and not worth it!” Torifu lunged to grab her and missed, fingertips skimming her lab coat. “Oh shit.”

The Zetsu, in all its primitive and malevolent glory, saw a golden opportunity.

“Koharu, look out!” Danzo yelled as the Zetsu gathered itself to lunge at her back. Koharu jerked around, bringing a knife to bear, just as large jar sailed over her head to smash through its crude face and shatter in the remnants of the centrifuge.

 _Uh oh,_ Hiruzen thinks faintly.

“Hit the deck!” Tobirama shouted, literally flinging himself away from the sudden horde of angry, stinging insects. Luckily for all their skins the yellow jackets seem more interested in the flailing Zetsu.

“Nobody panic!” Homura yelped, doing a bit of flailing himself. “The smoke in the room should be adequate to make them drowsy. This is not a serious problem!”

Hiruzen slowly, achingly, buried his head in his hands.

“This is a well ventilated room, you ass!” Torifu hissed incredulously, jerkily pointing to the various grates on the ceiling that the smoke was merrily exiting through. “And sedating wasps requires drugs besides!”

“Uh, one, _yellow jackets_ ,” Homura said imperiously, clutching imaginary pearls. “And two, I can’t believe Professor Aburame _lied_ to me!”

“I can,” Hiruzen mutters.

This was. That was all too much for Hiruzen to deal with. He finally found it. His _last straw_. His uttermost limit. His _lowest threshold for all this bullshit._

“That is not the point!” Danzo snarled, practically jammed into a cupboard trying to escape the fury of yellow jackets slowly taking over the room.

Thankfully, most of them were stuck in the Zetsu.

As if to add insult to injury, all the stingers were promptly pointed outwards.

“I can’t stand it anymore! I’m getting out of here!” Hiruzen whirled and grappled with the doorknob, yanking and rattling it desperately but ineffectively, growing more distressed as the door refused to budge.

“Don’t you dare open that door!” Tobirama bellowed. “We can’t let anything loose!”

Hiruzen leaned on the door despairingly. “We’re all going to die. We’re going to erupt in boils, and then we’re all going to die.”

“Wow, way to be the weak link here, Saru!” Koharu drawled sarcastically, somehow having made her way to the emergency shower. Hiruzen bleakly commended her will not to burn to death even if it would do nothing against yellow jackets.

“No, he’s right,” Torifu said with all the certainty of a man who knows his own doom.

And just then, the door was yanked open and Hiruzen was spilled out into the hallway.

“Oh, yeah, it opens outwards,” Hiruzen said woozily to the ceiling. “I can’t believe I forgot.”

“ _What the fuck is going on here?!_ ” Screeched someone who looked an awful lot like they were related to Kagami if you squinted really hard.

* * *

Madara was so shaken he almost dropped his axe.

He’d seen many a weird and _dumbass_ scenario in all his time as a firefighter. He’s seen drunks and addicts of various kinds accidentally setting fires. He’s seen cooking incidences so often it’s become a private bingo game at the station. He’s even seen his fair share of arson cases to cover up other crimes; just a fact of his job sometimes.

But this? This _fuckery_? Definitely hit his top ten of fire related shenanigans.

A yellow jacket whizzed by his face and Madara jerked out of his stupor in alarm, frantically flailing to get it away. Satisfied it had fled to terrorize anyone else still in the building he grabbed the scruff of the kid on the ground and hauled him out of the doorway.

“Stay!” He ordered, pointing at the ground for emphasis. Then he turned and marched through the door like a soldier across a battlefield, staring certain death in the eye. Or at least severe discomfort and several days with baking soda and benadryl.

It was a complete madhouse inside.

And Madara was almost impressed.

_Except for the part where he really fucking wasn’t._

Acting swiftly, he grabbed the weedy looking kid with black hair by the scruff, hooks the wide eyed kid in glasses around the neck with his arm, and sending a sharp glare at Torifu, whom Madara vaguely recalled as that kid who used to have a lot of sleepovers with Kagami, kicked them out into the hall. You would think, all being in the same exclusive Honors program as Kagami they would all understand what _evacuate the premises_ means, but no, they would rather stick around and die apparently.

This is why Madara went into firefighting. Because he cares about the fact some people are too dumb to live.

He turned around just as the girl performed an actually impressive baseball slide out of the room and knocked Glasses Kid into Weedy Kid and toppled them both over onto Monkey Brat still on the ground. It was beautiful. Thank his impressive Uchiha memory.

“Hurry!” The girl cried. “The professor’s still in there!”

Speaking of people too dumb to live.

In the time Madara took getting people out the erstwhile professor Senju he’s heard so much about had gotten off the floor, wrapped his coat around his head to protect it from the yellow jackets, and climbed onto the table.

“What are you doing, you fool, do you want to break your neck?” Madara demanded.

“You’re the one who opened the door and risk the Zetsu escaping!” The professor snarled behind his mask, brandishing his tongs at… _dearly beloved fuck, what is that thing?!_ “Fool.”

“Oh god, what _is_ that thing?!” Madara clutched his axe with one hand and the doorway with another. “Did you _make_ that?”

“Don’t be daft!” The professor snapped, getting a good swipe in and making the… thing ...screech. What were those tongs even made of? “As if I’d make anything so fundamentally useless.”

The seething mass of darkness screeched again, this time in outrage, and lunged across the gap between counter tops, pseudo-claws grasping. The professor danced lightly back across the table, batting the claws away, enticing the creature to crawl onto the center table, yellow jackets and all. Madara shuddered at the size of the thing.

“ _Eat you_ ,” the creature rasped.

Oh, holy fucking shit. Madara glanced at the axe hanging limply from his hand. That, that would be useful right now, wouldn’t it? Fire sciences didn’t cover this when he was in school.

Who was he kidding, only his nightmares covered this.

“Go back to the void you flesh-sucking, primordial amoeba!” the professor spat, landing a hit on the creatures eye. It lashed out blindly, forcing him to leap up to avoid a spiky blow to the leg, and that was when Madara swung his axe into its side, thoroughly distracting it.

“Hey, quick question,” Madara grunted, yanking his axe out of the ooze. He grimaced at the black slime it trailed in the process.

“Busy.” Came the impatient reply.

“It’s important,” Madara insisted, ducking an angry swipe at his head.

“Fine. What?”

“WHY THE FUCK DON’T YOUR SPRINKLERS WORK?” Madara screeched, chopping into the slimy creature so hard at least three yellow jackets were expelled by the force of the blow to fall sadly on the floor.

Seriously, none of the sprinklers were working at all! What kind of safety violation was this? If he survived this, Madara was going to personally file a complaint with OSHA or whoever was in charge of safety standards here.

It was also possible he was trying to disassociate the horror as he experienced it by trying to think of something else, literally anything else.

Unfortunately, his screeching took the professor so off guard he over extended his back step, collided with the sink faucet, and tripped backwards. Madara yelped and lunged to catch him, dropping the axe in the process. In a split second he decided against setting him back on his feet and hauled ass to the door.

No way was he ignoring this golden opportunity to evacuate the last civilian in the line of fire.

“Put me down!” Infuriatingly, said squirming civie didn’t get the memo. Or the common sense God gave an otter. “It isn’t contained yet!” Yeah, that was readily apparent. “And the sprinklers aren’t my fault!”

“Not on your fucking life!” Madara staggered out the door posthaste and dropped the man in the hallway with a sense of satisfaction that was only a little petty. Just a bit. He earned it, okay?

The professor angrily yanked off his coat and mask and… honestly, Madara stopped paying attention to whatever he was saying in favor of taking in how hot he was. Were faculty even allowed facial tattoos now? Regardless, they were doing wonderful things to the lines of his face, and the way they matched the color of his eyes when he was worked up!

Madara was abruptly jarred back to reality when the professor took on a mildly alarmed look and brought his tongs to bear just as something large hit the floor with a loud, wet smack. Oh fuck.

Madara whirled around to see the creature had rolled off the end of the table, grinning with a crudely forming maw of wasp stingers like a nightmarish doodle in the Ars Goetia. He repressed a shudder, viscerally missing his axe.

“We cannot let it escape,” the walking hot for teacher fantasy murmured. “I lured it away from the hole in the counter but the door is… rather too obvious of an escape route to trick it twice.” One of the students whimpered. “Children, perhaps now would a good time for you to calmly make your way to an exit.”

Oh, fucking finally, Madara thought with the one corner of his mind not taken up with blaring danger alarms. He cast about frantically for any suitable weapon when his gaze was caught by a fire extinguisher case not two feet from the door. He stepped away from the door, the professor taking his place automatically, and yanked the case open.

He had vague notions of using it as a blunt instrument but instinct took over when the creature made for the doorway. He pulled the pin, aimed the nozzle, and fired.

Amazingly, it worked.

The professor jumped out of splatter range with a curse, staring wide eyed as the creature shrieked and hissed and withered under the onslaught of foamy fire suppressant. Puddling on the floor in a mess of black goop and dead wasps with a last impotent wail. Madara cursed his imagination for imposing “What a world, what a world…” into the ear-splitting noise.

“Sodium bicarbonate?” The professor’s face twitched, looking the most hilariously outraged Madara has ever seen on anyone. “That was the answer all along? _Sodium bicarbonate._ ”

Madara tilted the fire extinguisher, noting, “I think this one’s potassium bicarbonate actually.”

The professor twitched.

“To be fair,” the girl offered, none of the students having actually left so much as retreated slightly down the hall, “We weren’t exactly inclined to stop the Zetsu from being on fire when that was the point in the first place.”

“It’s true,” Glasses kid nodded.

There was a thump from the stairs and they all jerked around to see Kagami collapse at the top, several bags spilling around his desperately panting form. “What did I miss?”

“Nothing much, we killed mold.” Weedy kid said nonchalantly. Monkey brat made a helpless noise.

“What?!” Kagami yelped, scrambling out his shopping mess and promptly tripping on a fire extinguisher. Torifu helpfully facepalmed.

“Excuse you, _I_ killed the m-mold,” Madara stumbled over the word incredulously. Mold was not the word he would ascribe to it but damn if he wasn’t going to be more vigilant about cleaning his bathroom now if that really was the case. “Are those fresh extinguishers?” He barely waited for Kagami’s affirmative. “Good. Walk your little friends through how they work and put out that fire in there.”

“Isn’t that your job?” the girl demanded.

“Yes, yes it is,” Madara said, a sliver of hysterical laughter rising in his throat now that the danger is over. “You know what isn’t my job?” He pointed at the mess the professor was now tentatively digging through with the end of his tongs. “ _Fucking that_.”

“So I,” Madara continued with forced blitheness, grabbing the professor by the back of his shirt, “Am leaving. And I’m taking this with me.”

“I don’t even know you,” the professor retorted, trying to squirm out of his grip but Madara grabbed for the middle of his back where he couldn’t reach, so ha.

“I’m Uchiha Madara, and you’re Senju Tobirama,” Madara said, pulling him past the gaping students. “I hope you like Italian because I’m going to need so many breadsticks to recover from this day. _So many._ ”

“I suppose if I’m getting breadsticks out of it…”

 


End file.
